April 25th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

Pivot3 Announces Priority Aware HCI, Acuity

Today Pivot3 announcing what it is referring to as the industry’s first priority-aware hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software platform, Acuity. According to Pivot3, Acuity will allow companies to confidently consolidate multiple mixed-application workloads onto a single infrastructure. Acuity will also leverage NVMe PCIe flash to deliver ultra-high performance.

The HCI market is expanding but some are reporting growing pains: unpredictable performance, lack of automation, and inefficient scale and capacity utilization. Pivot3 aims to address these issues with Acuity by simplifying workload management via its fifth-generation policy-based management engine and comprehensive data services. Pivot3 states that Acuity can apply resources to mission-critical applications, guaranteeing performance and predictable results, through its priority-ware software platform.

Another way to bring greater performance is by leveraging ultra-low-latency NVMe PCIe flash. NVMe can provide much better performance than both SATA and SAS SSD. Adding NVMe to Acuity allows users to consolidate performance and latency-sensitive applications onto HCI. The addition of NVMe can help customers see improvements in response times for databases, enterprise applications, business analytics, and VDI. The density seen with NVMe could potentially translate into a smaller data center footprint.

Self-management with a customizable performance dashboard for ongoing management decisions based on extensive application insight;

A policy scheduler allowing administrators to easily schedule performance and data protection policy changes based on cyclical business processes that change application requirements.

Acuity will provide a comprehensive set of data services. This will include Pivot3’s patented erasure coding, which the company states can deliver up to 82% usable storage capacity. Other data services include snapshot and clones, application-integrated data protection, data reduction, and integrations with VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter. The new Acuity software platform can run on a broad set of HCI nodes, including Pivot3’s new Flash and Hybrid Accelerator nodes and Flash and Hybrid nodes.